1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a computer based production release system and, more particularly, to a plant floor production release system which automatically interfaces a production release tool to a plant floor monitoring system to provide an integrated approach to a manufacturing software design. The system according to the invention is a conceptual tool that uses a top down release process which involves creating an order list of production orders to be released to the manufacturing floor for which all components have been allocated and are available for release. The invention provides an easy to use user friendly interface for the production planner on a split screen format to assist the production planner in releasing orders based on defined management criteria where the system automatically sets up select priorities for release based on the management criteria.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The process of designing, developing and manufacturing a set of new products, or making major changes to existing products, presents many challanges to product managers and manufacturing managers to bring a product to market for the least cost, within schedule while maintaining product quality. In today's highly competitive industries, product managers and manufacturing managers require information to address many problems that arise because of the complexity of new products and the complexity of world-wide production and the changing nature of competition. The requirement that products be manufactured in as short a period as possible while maintaining a low level of inventory on the shop floor to meet customer needs presents conflicting criteria to be analyzed in order to make timely decisions.
Many authors have published papers and books in the field of production management. For example, Joseph Orlicky wrote Material Requirements Planning, published by McGraw-Hill, which has become the industry standard reference for almost all job shop planning requirements. This concept of planning and releasing is well accepted and, even today, many vendors are selling software based on the concept. Nevertheless, this concept does not lend itself to releasing shop orders in the most efficient manner.
D. T. Phillips and G. L. Hogg published a paper entitled "A State-of-the-Art Survey of Dispatching Rules for Manufacturing Job Shop Operation", International Journal of Production Research, vol. 20, no. 1, (1982), pp. 27 to 45, which provides varying dispatching rules that can be used in a planning process. Though the areas of planning and scheduling have been discussed in detail, not a single product has been developed which provides an easy to use and user friendly method of automatically assigning priorities to orders prior to releasing them to the manufacturing floor based on management criteria of increased throughput, minimized work-in-process inventory and reduced cycle time while maintaining customer committments. What is needed is an expert system which is simple to use and user friendly that transforms the management criteria, i.e., increased throughput, reduced work-in-process inventory, and minimized cycle time, and provides the planner a mechanism that automatically assignes priorities to shop orders to be released prior to the actual release of orders to the manufacturing floor.
Expert systems are a branch of computer science, generally referred to as artificial intelligence, which exhibit characteristics normally associated with human behavior including learning, reasoning, solving problems, and so forth. More specifically, an expert system or "knowledge-based" system uses certain rules and a database to provide a user interactive environment in the form of a "consultation dialog", just as the user would interact with a human expert.